towels packed, will travelhttps://towelspacked.wordpress.com
Mon, 21 Jan 2019 21:56:09 +0000 en
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1 http://wordpress.com/https://s0.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngtowels packed, will travelhttps://towelspacked.wordpress.com
top of Texashttps://towelspacked.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/top-of-texas/
https://towelspacked.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/top-of-texas/#respondMon, 21 Jan 2019 21:50:20 +0000http://towelspacked.wordpress.com/?p=10502A third of the way through our Southwest road trip, Christmas Eve found us in Artesia, NM – a small town that owes its name to a long ago depleted artesian aquifer and whose present existence is supported mainly by oil and gas refineries. A ghost town under ordinary circumstances, Artesia seemed doubly so as we navigated its deserted, halogen-lit streets. Even grocery stores were closed on account of the approaching holiday. The neon billboards of fast food restaurants, which remained stubbornly open, provided the only sign of life as night approached. We had stocked up on groceries before our arrival and hunkered down in our inn with a board game to while away the evening.

We were up early the next morning, however, speeding south toward the Texas border before most Artesians had gotten up to unwrap their Christmas presents. We had planned to spend Christmas in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park – a dubious proposition in light of both the holiday and the government shutdown, which had begun half a week earlier. In the early days of the shutdown there was still cause for guarded optimism that the impasse would be resolved quickly and that the impact of the government closure would be minimal. Most national parks had stayed open through the shutdown’s first weekend, but the closures began to mount as Christmas approached. We were forced to scrap our planned visit to the nearby Carlsbad Caverns, for example, and made the most of a bad situation when we found the White Sands National Monument shuttered to visitors.

We weren’t sure what to expect in Texas, but remained cautiously optimistic as we approached the Guadalupe Mountains. The trailhead for several of the park’s signature hikes is close to the Pine Springs Visitor Center, near the road. In the event that the park was closed, we figured we could leave our car parked by the side of the roadway and sneak in a decent hike. We weren’t alone in this assessment. We passed about a dozen cars in a dirt parking lot a quarter-mile from the park entrance and returned to the lot after seeing a barrier blocking the park entrance.

Upon closer inspection, the barrier proved to be unlocked. Unlike at White Sands the previous day, there were no shutdown closure signs. Shortly after we had passed under the barrier and entered the park a car pulled up. The driver got out and opened the barrier, closing it behind him after driving through. Watching the car pull away up the main road, we stopped to hold a brief conference. Should we retrieve the car and drive to the trailhead? Doing so would save us from extending the already demanding 8.5-mile round-trip, 3,000-foot ascent of Guadalupe Peak, which lay ahead.

“It would be nice to have the car waiting for us when we come off the mountain,” S mused. “Yes, but what if the barrier is locked while we’re hiking?” D countered. Having already walked a quarter-mile, we decided to press on. After passing the visitor center, we took a trail that forked off the paved road and passed through a campground, which was packed to the gills with cars. Other visitors must have made their Christmas reservations months in advance and were unwilling to let the shutdown spoil their holiday.

At the trailhead we paused to readjust our gear and snap a dino picture for Munchkin. “Would you also like a photo of you two?” a camper asked before adding, “I hope you brought crampons. It is treacherously slick up there.” His words echoed in the back of our minds as we set off on the trail up Guadalupe Peak, the highest mountain in Texas. The first mile-and-a-half consists of a series of steep switchbacks and is the most physically demanding part of the trail. The sun shone brightly through the thin clouds and we worked up a cold sweat, feeling the churn of lactic acid in our thighs as we approached the final switchback.

From the valley floor, Guadalupe Peak appears as a nondescript hulk of pine-covered rock. More than a thousand feet of mountain is hidden from view by a false summit that must be crested before one can truly appreciate the peak’s breathtaking beauty. After the switchbacks, the trail levels off a bit, the path passing into the shadow of the mountain’s forest-covered back side. We felt the temperature drop instantly, and as we passed out of the sunlight we found the path crusted over with a thick layer of ice. Fortunately, the trail was fairly rocky; small stones poked through the ice sheet in enough places to provide traction for our hiking boots. We ate lunch at a makeshift campground that provided a modest windbreak before pushing on the final 45 minutes to the summit.

The last mile again presented us with icy terrain along a steep path ascending through boulders – treacherous, but navigable with a decent pair of boots and hiking poles. The views, as we approached the top, were incredible: endless vistas of craggy canyons stretching from the hem of the Guadalupe Mountains down toward the heart of Texas, with the twisted summit of El Capitan presiding over the terrain. With the sun already casting long shadows by the time we reached the summit, we did not linger too long at the top, snapping a few panorama shots and heading back down again.

Exiting the park as dusk fell, we had much to celebrate: not only did we complete an amazing hike, but also our prescience had paid off. Only a handful of cars remained inside the park, and the barrier, which had been closed but unlocked when we entered, was now bolted shut. A sign announcing the park closure was lashed to it. Had we driven our car to the trailhead we would have been well and truly screwed.

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https://towelspacked.wordpress.com/2019/01/16/hidden-beauty/#commentsWed, 16 Jan 2019 01:52:18 +0000http://towelspacked.wordpress.com/?p=10488Hands down, the top highlight of our most recent trip to the Southwest was a visit to Chiricahua – a little-known national monument that is tucked away in the southeast corner of Arizona, near the border with New Mexico. The park receives between 50,000 and 60,000 visitors a year – less than one-tenth of the number of people who visit nearby Saguaro, where we had spent the previous day.

We too probably would have skipped Chiricahua if we did not have to drive 275 miles from Tucson, AZ to Las Cruces, NM in one day. Looking at Google and estimating drive times, one does not get a good appreciation for the immense distances that separate the dots on the map that comprise a sensible itinerary. We only hiked a total of 40 miles during our ten-day road trip – a number that, to be fair, was a bit depressed by the government shutdown. Still, we drove more than 2,000 miles (2,003, to be exact) to complete our loop through Arizona and New Mexico.

Looking on the map at how I-10 snakes parallel to the Mexican border, D spotted a splotch of green roughly halfway between Tucson and Las Cruces. Whatever the park’s merits, it promised – at the very least – to break up the long drive. One glimpse at the Internet was enough for us to realize that Chiricahua should be on our agenda even if we would have to go out of our way to visit it.

The national monument was established nearly a century ago to protect the Chiricahua Mountains and its extensive array of hoodoos and balancing rocks. Forged by a powerful volcanic eruption millions of years ago and whittled by wind and time, Chiricahua’s rocks provide nearly endless fodder for the imagination. Rocks shaped like animals (in addition to the unmistakable and sign-posted Duck-on-a-Rock, we spotted a dinosaur and a camel’s head) rub shoulders with improbably balanced behemoths and slender stone pillars.

The so-called Big Loop strings together most of the park’s highlights via a series of trails that connect two major canyons. It allows access to a diverse array of vantage points, thus maximizing visitors’ appreciation for Chiricahua’s unique stone formations. A trail that offers vistas across a hoodoo valley will dovetail with another one that leads down into a canyon, with stone towers and big balanced rocks towering overhead, before a third trail leads the visitor up to the next magnificent overlook.

If one tacks on two mile-long side trails – the first up to Inspiration Point and the second into the Heart of Rocks – the entire loop comes in at just under ten miles. It’s a lot of up-and-down hiking, all of it eminently worth it. Inspiration Point opens up a jaw-dropping vista of the main hoodoo-filled canyon, while the Heart of Rocks loop leads visitors on an up-close-and-personal tour of the park’s most unique formations.

Whenever we come across a gem like this, we always feel ourselves tugged in opposite directions. Should we share our find with others or keep it to ourselves? Granted we visited in the off-season, but the fact that there were hardly any other visitors on the trails in this stunningly beautiful place felt like a luxury. Shortly after our visit to the Tetons this summer, for example, we came across an article describing how the park urged social media influencers to stop geo-tagging their visits to prevent the destruction of pristine habitat. Similarly, we saw firsthand how the “discovery” of the Wave by Microsoft sent so many visitors flocking to a remote corner of northern Arizona that park authorities had to implement a lottery-based permit system.

Ultimately, we decided it would be selfish to keep our adventure in Chiricahua to ourselves. Travel blogs have replaced guidebooks as our main source of inspiration when trip-planning. We feel compelled to return the favor. So if you find yourself in southern Arizona, do yourself a favor and make a day trip to Chiricahua. You won’t regret it.

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https://towelspacked.wordpress.com/2019/01/14/snow-day/#respondMon, 14 Jan 2019 21:57:46 +0000http://towelspacked.wordpress.com/?p=10457A friend of ours is fond of saying that there is no such thing as cold weather; rather, the problem lies in poor clothing choices. Junebug, for one, disagrees with this sentiment. It does not matter how warmly we dress her or how much we play up the fun to be had with fresh powdery snow. The last few months she got her first taste of a proper winter – with snow and temperatures in the teens during our Thanksgiving trip to Maine and a snowstorm in DC this weekend. To say that she did not enjoy her exposure to the frosty weather would be an understatement.

DC got a light dusting of snow a couple months ago, but this weekend represented the first real snowfall of the season. Munchkin was out the door and frolicking in the snow with his best friend, who lives two houses down, before we could wrestle Junebug into her snowsuit and boots. With today’s snow day closure, he got to double down on the fun, as he and D staged an epic snowball fight after Junebug fell asleep in her stroller.

Junebug had quite a different perspective on the inclement weather. Here she is, seemingly having a great time, but don’t let the photo fool you. This shot took a coordinated effort that involved D building a snowman while S nursed Junebug in the snow. We managed to capture a furtive smile, but as soon as S stepped out of the frame, Junebug reverted to her cranky squawks, forcing us to abort the outdoor playtime. And yes, we realize she would be warmer and happier if she were wearing gloves, but she does not share that realization and throws the gloves off as soon as we put them on her hands.

Munchkin has always loved the snow. But then again, he was a winter baby, born in Portland, Maine in February. Also, we had been serving in Moldova at the time, so he went from Portland to Chisinau, which also gets its fair share of snow. By the time we returned to DC for Snowzilla, Munchkin was almost two and had lived through two winters.

After two years in Africa, we have mixed emotions about living for a year in DC and running through the full gamut of seasons, from muggy summer to chilly winter. Despite spending our formative years in locales with considerably colder climates – Moscow and New York for D, New England for S – a couple of years without a proper winter is enough to make us grow soft about the cold. We’re not as soft as Junebug, but it’s fair to say we are looking forward to our next tropical assignment overseas.

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https://towelspacked.wordpress.com/2019/01/14/life-under-shutdown/#commentsMon, 14 Jan 2019 15:20:50 +0000http://towelspacked.wordpress.com/?p=10467As a general rule, we avoid political, sensitive, and potentially divisive subjects in this blog. We write about our travels, our kids, and life in the Foreign Service while steering clear of the polemics of local politics and the issues we work on overseas. Despite spending some of our Foreign Service careers in Washington, we also try to ignore Washington intrigue and rarely discuss American politics. That said, it would be intellectually dishonest to continue posting about our goings-on without writing about the ongoing government shutdown, which is now in its 24th day and has come to be a prominent feature of our careers and our lives.

Including the hours-long Rand Paul shutdown last year, this is the fourth lapse in appropriations of our Foreign Service career. The first time we experienced a government shutdown in the Foreign Service was 2013. We had just arrived in Chisinau and D had been scheduled to travel to Kyiv for work when the lapse in funding occurred. S, four months pregnant and speaking no Russian, had left for Ukraine a day early. D was literally on his way to the airport that Friday in late September – the last workday of the fiscal year – when he received a phone call from the Embassy telling him that his trip was cancelled due to the impending shutdown. The Embassy cancelled his ticket reservation and D had to repurchase the ticket on arrival at the airport, lucking out that no one else had snagged the seat on the sold out, once-a-day flight. D used annual leave to cover his travel, which in retrospect should not have been allowed since furloughed employees cannot take paid leave and “excepted” employees (those deemed too essential to be furloughed) must report to work.

In our case, we represent one of each group. S is in long-term training, which is necessary for her to be able to do her job in Manila but obviously fails to clear the bar for essential government services during a shutdown. She has been furloughed and will remain so until the shutdown ends. D was furloughed initially, but has been un-furloughed since the beginning of this month. His office must stay open and has been operating at fifty percent staffing, with a rotation to ensure equitability in burden sharing. Of course, neither of us will get paid until the shutdown ends, which is not quite how we envisioned the dual-career dream when S joined the Foreign Service last summer.

Still, we count ourselves among the lucky ones. We have some savings and no loans to pay off. We have to pay rent, of course, and bills – same as everyone else – but we don’t have a mortgage so we don’t risk losing our house if our saving run out. We are all too aware that many of our 800,000 colleagues who have been directly affected by this lapse of appropriations are not so fortunate. Of course, if this does drag on for “months or even years,” our current position would not remain tenable for long. In fact, we would run into logistical challenges before financial difficulties would force us to reconsider our career choices. Chief among these is the fact that our non-renewable lease runs out in June when we are supposed to depart for Manila. If S’s missed training forces her to delay our departure date, we would have to look for new lodging, as our current landlords will reoccupy their residence this summer. D would also be in a difficult situation, as his current assignment expires in June and he has no onward posting.

Because DC is a hub for federal workers, the District has developed a defense mechanism for coping with government shutdowns. There are restaurants and food banks that provide free food to furloughed workers and bars that offer discounted, shutdown-themed cocktails. On Friday, D went to a concert at the Fillmore in Silver Spring – a show he had marked on his calendar months ago – and found out that his government ID entitled him to a gratis entry, part of the Fillmore’s “Free Furlough Friday” special.

This kind of solidarity from local businesses is great, but ultimately does not balance out the pernicious effects of the shutdown. We appreciate the availability of freebies, but we would much rather return to the jobs we love and be compensated for our work. However you feel about our elected leaders or the proposed wall on our southwestern border, we hope you want the same for us and our 800,000 similarly affected colleagues. Call us “federal workers” or “public servants,” we are tax-paying Americans with families to support; ending the shutdown is not a political issue – it’s a human one.

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https://towelspacked.wordpress.com/2019/01/13/western-wonders/#respondSun, 13 Jan 2019 19:11:53 +0000http://towelspacked.wordpress.com/?p=10448One wonders what the United States would look like now if the first colonists had landed on the shores of California instead of at Jamestown and Plymouth Bay. Would the lands comprising California’s nine national parks have survived in their pristine state if colonization and the War of Independence had played out on the West Coast? Would America’s eastern shore have been spared some of the ravages of industrialization?

We wonder this, in part, because growing up on the East Coast we always thought of it as the better of America’s two seaboards. Only now that we have spent multiple road trips exploring the western half of the country are we prepared to concede that the West Coast is best.

One look at a map of U.S. national parks renders this truth self-evident. There is Acadia all the way in northern Maine, a trio of parks in Florida, and vast stretches of emptiness in between, broken only by Shenandoah, Congaree, and the Great Smoky Mountains. To get to California’s nine, one would have to add in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave and Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley, which accounts for all of the national parks east of the Mississippi River, excluding Voyageurs (Minnesota) and Isle Royale (Michigan), which are tucked up near the Canada border and are hardly accessible from the East Coast.

The western half of the country, on the other hand, is dotted with national parks, as well as other federal lands – national monuments and conservation areas – that protect and celebrate our nation’s natural treasures. After our first road trip out West, we had resolved to try to visit every one of America’s 60 national parks.

Following our holiday road trip to Arizona and New Mexico, we are now a third of the way there. The shutdown forced us to adjust our plans somewhat, and two of the national parks we had intended to visit – Carlsbad Caverns and Petrified Forest – fell off our itinerary. We managed to get into two others, however, starting our trip with a visit to Saguaro NP, named for the Sonoran Desert’s unique cacti.

Saguaro is actually comprised of two distinct areas – the Rincon Mountain District (East) and the Tucson Mountain District (West); the city of Tucson lies in the middle. We toyed with the idea of trying to do both in the one day our itinerary allowed but decided not to stretch ourselves too thin. Instead, we spent the day in the western part of the park: looking at petroglyphs; admiring the diversity of the saguaro cacti, which towered over us with their arms akimbo; and hiking Wasson Peak, the tallest mountain in the park.

The seven-mile hike, with the sun beating down on us, took longer than we had anticipated. We got back to our car just as the setting sun lit up the desert sky in a rainbow of radiant colors. The hike was beautiful and definitely worth it, and we were glad that we decided to do it instead of trying to visit both parts of Saguaro. We intend to come back to this part of the country again, especially since we missed out on the Carlsbad Caverns, so we hope to have another opportunity to visit the Rincon Mountains.

Just as we had following our previous tour in Chisinau, D had suggested we leave the kids with our parents for part of our home leave, but S nixed the idea. Junebug turned one just as we returned home and S was not ready for an extended separation. Six months later, the demands of resettling taking their toll and S’s head swimming from studying Tagalog, she was ready. Her mom kindly agreed to take care of the kids while we took our first trip alone — just the two of us — in two years.

Of course, we could not have envisioned the government shutdown when we settled on the Southwest as the destination for our vacation. All we knew is that no leave is allowed during long-term training, the week between Christmas and New Year’s being the sole exception to the rule. We had envisioned a warm break from the bleak DC weather — spending the week in Puerto Rico, Florida, or the Caribbean — but by the time D received approval to take time off, flights to those destinations were prohibitively expensive.

Instead we decided to head to the Southwest, an area of the United States we have grown to love more the more we have explored it, and which also promised considerably milder weather than the faux winter in DC. The first few days, this promise was fulfilled. The temperatures in the desert dipped down at night, but in the daytime we enjoyed t-shirt weather while hiking close to our nation’s southern border.

Toward the end of the trip, however, as we headed north into the mountains of New Mexico and Arizona, the temperatures plummeted. “This might be the only way we’ll have a white Christmas,” S joked while we wandered around the White Sands National Monument on Christmas Eve. Not so, it turns out. We hiked above the snow line the next day, and nearly got snowed in in Santa Fe the day after.

Initially, S thought we would be able to call home and Skype with the kids during our travels. However, being two hours behind East Coast time and staying out on the trail until dark most days made this impossible. S checked in with her mom in the evenings to see how she was doing, but missed the kids something fierce.

Our best way of maintaining contact, it turned out, was through Fred the dinosaur, whom Munchkin insisted D take with us. Reprising his travels with Pinocch in South Africa, D took scores of photos of Fred throughout our travels. Each evening, as we sat down to dinner, D sent the pictures to S’s mom, adding little descriptions and informative blurbs about the places we had visited and the things we had seen. Munchkin loved these daily updates and sometimes texted back. He does not yet know how to read, but he knows his letters and would ask nana how to spell things, typing out his responses in a curious mix of lowercase and capital letters.

It was great to have a break from all of our adult responsibilities and it was nice to be able to maintain contact with Munchkin while we traveled, but neither feeling approached the joy of reuniting with our little ones. D even asked S to hang back when we returned and let him greet the kids first because he knew they would cling to her as soon as they saw their mama. Junebug, who still does not talk, giggled with happiness when she saw us. From the way S clutched her, with tears in her eyes adorning her smile, there was little doubt that the feeling of wordless joy was mutual.

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https://towelspacked.wordpress.com/2019/01/03/shut-down-for-what/#respondThu, 03 Jan 2019 15:31:11 +0000http://towelspacked.wordpress.com/?p=10407TV screens tuned to CNN and Fox News trumpeted the impending government shutdown as we made our way to our gate two Fridays ago, boarding our flight to Phoenix hours before a lapse in appropriations, which is now in its 13th day and appears to have no immediate end in sight. Our automated furlough notices arrived the next morning, as we started our second Southwest road trip with an ambitious itinerary of national and state parks in Arizona and New Mexico.

Initially, we hardly felt the effects of the shutdown. Visitor centers and fee collection booths at national parks were closed, but the parks themselves largely remained open through the first weekend of the shutdown. We visited Saguaro National Park and hiked in Chiricahua National Monument — the undisputed hiking highlight of the trip.

We encountered our first real hiccup on the third day, which we had planned to split between the White Sands National Monument and the Carlsbad Caverns. Both parks are located in New Mexico, but are several hours apart, and visiting both in one day was always going to be a tight squeeze. Checking the NPS website, we saw that the caves would be closed even as the rest of Carlsbad Caverns National Park remained open. Visiting the park while missing out on its star attraction made little sense, so we decided to focus our attention on White Sands.

Imagine our disappointment when we arrived at White Sands only to find the gate bolted shut and adorned with signs proclaiming the park’s closure due to the shutdown. Fortunately, the closed gate did not spoil completely our visit to this unique area. A mile down the road from the main entrance one of the park’s iconic white dunes has spilled over the fence erected ages ago to prevent unauthorized access to the park. We saw a couple dozen cars parked on the highway shoulder and joined the other out-of-state visitors determined to have a good time despite the shutdown. We walked around a bit, but didn’t linger long enough to see the local news crew arrive; the story eventually made national headlines.

As the shutdown dragged on, more and more parks that had initially remained opened closed their gates to visitors. In addition to Carlsbad, Bandelier National Monument and the Petrified Forest National Park were also on our original itinerary, and both remain on our must-visit list. We cannot blame the shutdown entirely, however, as a major snowstorm hit northern New Mexico the day we had planned to visit Bandelier. The roads were iced over; it would have been impossible for us to visit even if the park had not been shuttered because of the lapse in government funding.

We made the best of the less-than-ideal situation, discovering a number of other attractions that we had not planned on visiting. In lieu of the Carlsbad Caverns, for example, we visited Roswell. We passed various extraterrestrial-inspired sights on our way through town before spending a pleasant afternoon driving around the Bitter Lake Wildlife Sanctuary as if on a bird-watching safari. We saw a Greater Roadrunner and large flocks of wintering ducks and geese, as well as some raptors and a number of smaller birds. In all, we added 14 new species to our bird list.

After ten days on the road, we flew back to DC on New Year’s Day. S will be forced to remain at home until the shutdown comes to an end and worries that she will completely lose the Tagalog she had learned if this impasse is not resolved soon. D has been un-furloughed and has returned to a mostly empty State Department building, joining the approximately 400,000 federal employees who have been instructed to continue working despite not getting paid.

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https://towelspacked.wordpress.com/2018/12/21/the-deto-dance/#commentsFri, 21 Dec 2018 22:00:52 +0000http://towelspacked.wordpress.com/?p=10396“A moment of silence, please/for those who never get the chance.They show up to the party/but they’re never asked to dance.”

It’s funny, this quality that certain songs possess of burrowing into the subconscious and then surfacing on a moment’s notice when their lyrics come in perfect harmony with our lives, as if they had been written for us or about us. Songs of love and loss are the most obvious examples, given the universality of these human experiences, but there are other, more off-beat matches when a song’s lyrics mysteriously fit and the totality of the music expresses one’s emotions much more perfectly than words alone ever could. The song playing on repeat in D’s mind these days is Streetlight Manifesto’s “A Moment of Silence” — a loser anthem that cuts to the core of D’s current job search frustrations despite being written about something else entirely.

In the two months since it became clear that D would not be successful in landing a position in Manila, he has dedicated his efforts to plan B: finding a Washington job that can be performed remotely. Unfortunately, while the State Department does have a provision for this kind of work, referred to as a DETO (domestic employee teleworking overseas), arranging this kind of agreement requires a herculean effort, fortuitous connections, and a minor miracle. D has approached a veritable alphabet soup of bureaus and offices across the Department, but has gotten very little traction to date. Hiring managers who initially enthuse over D’s qualifications and relevant experience grow distant when D brings up the prospects for a DETO — a four-letter word that palpably poisons the atmosphere and arrests conversations more effectively than any expletive.

No, a DETO would not be a good fit for this position, they all invariably say — and in some cases that is understandable. Some portfolios require frequent consultation on sensitive matters or time-sensitive inter-agency coordination that would be difficult to accomplish from across the world. But D has also reached out on plenty of positions where these conditions do not apply. We don’t have the technology to enable remote work in this position, one manager told D — a dubious claim nearly two decades into the twenty-first century. Another gave the head-scratching response that her office had too many vacancies and too much work to consider a DETO — this despite the fact that the incumbent in one of the about-to-be-vacated positions D had hoped to fill is currently teleworking through a DETO arrangement.

Worse still, some offices don’t even seem to be aware that Department policy allows for overseas telework. At the beginning of the bid cycle, HR compiles a list of positions that are listed as DETO-eligible, and the list this summer — across the entire Department and all pay grades — consisted of approximately a dozen positions. More than a handful of the managers D had approached about the possibility of a DETO responded by asking what a DETO is.

The most frustrating aspect of this — apart from the Department’s obvious systemic failure to value its employees enough to accommodate modern-day families with two working spouses — is the utter disconnect between what senior leaders say they want (an agile workforce, investment in technology) and the sad state of affairs in which we find ourselves. Given the sheer number of tandems (somewhere in the 15-20% range by most estimates) this lack of flexibility is simply mind-boggling.

All of this very much leaves D feeling like an unwanted wallflower at a junior high school dance — hence the resonance with the Streetlight Manifesto song. There are only so many times one can have a metaphorical door slammed in one’s face before the cumulative experience of rejection starts to take a toll on one’s self-worth.

The one silver lining to the cloud D has felt gather above him these last few months is the support he has received from the many other tandems he has come across in his heretofore unproductive job search. One common theme he has heard repeated several times is that hiring managers tend to change their minds about DETOs later in the bid cycle. Come spring, when the positions approach their rollover date and most eligible bidders have been assigned elsewhere, managers with looming vacancies sometimes come around to the idea that a telework employee is preferable to the alternative. Some managers unable to find suitable candidates for their jobs must get that wallflower feeling too.

“So tell me: how long do you think you can go before you lose it all?Before they call your bluff and watch you fall?
I don’t know but I’d like to think I had control/
at some point, but I let it go and lost my soul.
Sit tight but the revolution’s years away.
I’m losing faith and I’m running low on things to say…”

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https://towelspacked.wordpress.com/2018/12/18/superhero-sunday/#commentsTue, 18 Dec 2018 02:41:46 +0000http://towelspacked.wordpress.com/?p=10390Munchkin’s rapid descent into superhero obsession took us a bit by surprise. We consciously limit his screen time at home, but parental controls are no match for playground fads. As soon as Munchkin entered pre-K in the fall, his fealty to Paw Patrol and P.J. Masks was overcome by an overwhelming interest in Batman, Superman, Spiderman, and the like. At the library, he would pick out simple comic books for beginner readers; superhero-themed clothing began to multiply in his wardrobe; and the Disney/Pixar films D would sometimes watch with him on the weekends gave way to comic book-inspired cartoons.

When Munchkin announced that he wanted a Batman tower for Hanukkah, however, we hit the pause button. From their earliest moments, kids are not shy about expressing their desires; as parents, of course, we feel that we should balance their volition with common sense, gently steering our children toward things that are good for them. Junebug, for example, is entering an age when she grows increasingly demanding and melts down in fierce tantrums when she does not get what she wants — even when the things that she wants (typically to eat) are in no way good for her (like Play-Doh).

In the past, we chose gifts that would simultaneously be fun and challenging (strategy games, puzzles, books, construction and science kits), while trying to avoid the accretion of the kind of gaudy plastic crap toy makers excel at marketing to young children. “On the one hand, we already have too much junk and he changes his tastes so often, he might grow out of his Batman phase before the holidays end,” S mused, “On the other hand, we should take into account what he wants.”

In the end, we compromised. S’s parents gifted Munchkin the tower he said he wanted, while we got him a book on dinosaurs and a new cooperative board game. Watching him unwrap the giant Batman box was an exercise in pure vicarious happiness. We had Skyped S’s parents after lighting the menorah on the next-to-last night of Hanukkah, and Munchkin literally jumped for joy. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” he chanted, jumping up and down with a huge grin on his face, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”

During our visit to Bangor, Munchkin also had received other Batman-themed gifts: a remote-controlled bat-mobile from S’s uncle, a stuffed Batman doll, and a mask, cape, and tool-belt set that S’s mom partially made. He wears the cape and tool-belt quite often around the house. The toys, meanwhile, featured prominently in a briefly painful learning experience last week. On Friday, it was Munchkin’s turn for show-and-tell at school: his opportunity to be the center of circle time. Of course, he wanted to bring in his Batman gear. We tried to dissuade him, but he was adamant about bringing the bat-mobile and doll to show-and-tell. S called Munchkin’s teacher to ask that he keep an eye on these precious items, but to little avail. When S picked Munchkin up from school, the toys were nowhere to be seen. Fortunately, when S sent out a message to the class’s WhatsApp group, someone quickly responded to say that their son had brought the toys home and would be returning them the next school day. The teacher might have mixed up the two boys’ identical P.J. Masks backpacks.

The last night of Hanukkah Munchkin unwrapped our presents, and we were happy to see that here too we had hit the mark. The dinosaur book — part of the Usborne educational series — has become a bedtime staple, and the board game — Mole Rats in Space — is getting heavy use also. The game is a vast improvement on the classic Snakes & Ladders: players cooperate to help their mole rats navigate a snake-infested space ship, ascending ladders, sliding down chutes, and collecting key survival items on the way to their escape pod.

D tries to play a game with Munchkin every evening, using the little man’s recently discovered love of board games as a motivational tool to get him to eat his food. Not every night is a success in this respect; some evenings Munchkin is so uncooperative that dinner drags right into bedtime, which leaves both father and son a bit miffed at the end of the day. We began introducing board games around Munchkin’s third birthday, but it was not until recently that he finally developed the patience to play them the way they are meant to be played. In the past, he still enjoyed the games, but he tended to make up his own rules. In the last few months, however, Munchkin has surprised us with his concentration and strategic thinking.

The Mole Rats game, for example, is marketed for kids 7+ and is legitimately challenging — even with D helping Munchkin think through his moves, the snakes sometimes prevail. Munchkin does not always see multiple moves ahead, but after several iterations he has mastered the basic strategy and has grown adept at navigating his mole rat through the maze while sending the snakes down chutes that jettison them out into space (and thus off the game board). The game has earned a spot in the nightly rotation that also includes Outfoxed, a cute variation on the classic Clue in which players cooperate to identify a thieving fox before it escapes down a fox hole, and My First Carcassonne. Unlike the other two, the latter is not a cooperative game. D and Munchkin played it for the first time over the weekend. Again, D was impressed with how quickly the Munch grasped the game’s strategy. He even managed to win one of the rounds with only minimal assistance from D. “That was a lot of fun. I did very good,” Munchkin reported to S before going to bed, “but papa did most of the winning.”

As for the Batman tower, it has become Munchkin’s most highly prized toy. He keeps it in his room and locks the door when he leaves to ensure that Junebug does not play with it. He even insisted that we let him keep the original packaging and sometimes puts the tower back in the box for extra protection from his little sister and other would-be evildoers.

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https://towelspacked.wordpress.com/2018/12/13/between-two-worlds/#respondThu, 13 Dec 2018 02:51:58 +0000http://towelspacked.wordpress.com/?p=10380Azure, still waters of an alpine lake, shimmering under the glare of the noontime sun, cold as the snow-melt that feeds it. The craggy contour of jagged mountains, dappled in snow, ringed by evergreens. The flutter of a bird-wing and its owner’s clarion song — nature’s calling cards, beckoning us toward adventure. These are the mementos from our home leave road trip this past summer, and the images that fill our imagination in planning our next sojourn out West over the winter holidays.

These two trips will bookend our half-year stateside in 2018. The intervening months contain a world of upheaval and readjustment. The first trip, which after much deliberation we decided to take with the kids, proved an all-too-brief reprieve — an opportunity to recharge our batteries after the hectic scramble to tie up loose ends in Kigali and before the even more hectic scramble to get settled in DC. The second trip will be a true vacation — the first time in the 18 months since Junebug’s birth that we will travel without the kids.

Much needed though this getaway surely is, already we have felt our stress levels come down over the course of the last month or two. Munchkin is settled in his French immersion pre-K and loving it. Junebug similarly feels at home with her nanny-share and, in contrast to the tears she initially shed, hardly notices when D leaves for work after dropping her off in the morning. After a few hiccups, we finally got our new car registered and our finances straightened out, insofar as that’s possible given DC’s sky-high cost of living.

On the work front, S is trying not to be overwhelmed by her Tagalog training. The language is not as hard as Arabic or Polish, for example, but it is so completely foreign to her that she struggles with retaining vocabulary and can’t help but worry about passing the final test. Everyone we know in the Foreign Service community tells S not to stress about testing out, which is kind of like telling a person suffering from depression to cheer up. S is on language probation, which means she has to acquire sufficient proficiency to meet State Department standards in one of her first two assignments. She just missed the bar with French a couple of summers ago, and the possibility of failure with Tagalog weighs on her mind.

For D, after 3-4 hectic months, things have slowed down ahead of the approaching holidays. The first month D was forced to dedicate primarily to resolving various administrative hurdles (more than three weeks just to get an account transferred!) and trying to learn his new job responsibilities on the fly. The next couple of months his portfolio got busy just as the bidding season crunch hit. D was unsuccessful in securing an onward and is still looking for an assignment, but the process has slowed down considerably and does not require nearly as much daily attention and energy.

The difference in our stress levels from just a couple of months ago is telling in the activities that occupy our still limited free time. S still spends her evenings studying, but we’ve also found time to sort our photos and order holiday cards; D is making headway in his quest to read all Pulitzer-winning novels and our blog has experienced a bit of a resurgence. Early in our DC tenure we struggled to find the time and energy to organize play dates for Munchkin and social outings for ourselves, which we are now trying to actively remedy.

That we are feeling more settled does not mean that we feel at home, however. The two-year duration of our overseas assignments is short relative to those of other countries’ diplomatic corps, but it is long enough to enable us to make our assigned houses feel like homes. In our three stints overseas we have decorated, painted the walls, filled the rooms with our things, and planted gardens to make ourselves feel at home in a foreign land.

This house, on the other hand, will always feel like a temporary residence — one, moreover, that is already halfway behind us. With most of our belongings in storage, we rented a semi-furnished house. Our landlords’ decorations remain on the walls and their furniture crowds the rooms. And while we probably shipped back more stuff than we need, some crucial items we now realize we should have brought back with us were sent to storage instead.

Over the course of the last few weeks, we have begun to turn our gaze toward Manila, researching housing possibilities and school options for Munchkin, and making connections in our soon-to-be host country. We’ll return from leave just as the calendar flips to 2019 — a new page in our Foreign Service adventure, which will entail a new flurry of administrative and logistical activity at the outset of the new year.